Ctrip kept its staff through SARS and listed on Nasdaq six months later

Ctrip was founded in 1999 by James Liang, Ji Qi, Neil Shen and Fan Min; the site launched in October that year, and three venture rounds (IDG, Carlyle, SoftBank) raised roughly $18 million. It bought the airline-ticket company Coast Airline in April 2002 to enter air ticketing, and ended 2002 with net revenue of about RMB 100 million.

SARS hit from April to June 2003 and froze travel: May hotel room-nights fell ~72% and Q2 revenue dropped 41.7% to RMB 19.6 million. Ctrip's reply was anti-cyclical: its F-1 prospectus notes it 'maintained substantially the same level of staff' because SARS was 'an event of limited long-term significance'; management worked half-time at 60% pay while the freeze funded training, systems and a national air-booking platform. Liang wrote that 'after SARS, Ctrip will be better' and even tried to sell the company — nobody bought it; a Shanghai subsidy covered most of the quarter's operating loss.

The bet paid six months later: June room-nights recovered to ~109,000, Q3 revenue rebounded to RMB 58.1 million (roughly tripled quarter-on-quarter), and on 9 December 2003 Ctrip listed on Nasdaq. The $18 ADS raised $75.6 million; the stock opened at $24.01 and closed at $33.94, +88.56%, the biggest opening-day gain on Nasdaq in three years — and began Ctrip's run to becoming China's dominant online travel agent.

Six months after SARS peaked, Ctrip listed on Nasdaq (Dec 2003) raising $75.6M and closing +88.56% — the strongest day-one gain on the exchange in three years.

SARS was a timed shock with a known end: keeping trained staff was an options play — cheap while suspended, invaluable when demand returned within a quarter.

The trough was free capacity: training, IT and a national air-booking system built during the freeze carried the rebound at near-zero marginal cost, and the IPO window reopened with the recovery.

In a crisis with a foreseeable end, employees are capacity, not cost: cut pay and hours instead of headcount, invest the idle time in systems, and let the recovery pay for the pause.

Ctrip rode the rebound to become China's online travel giant. It merged with Qunar in October 2015 (Baidu's stake exchanged for a ~25% share of the combined company), was renamed Trip.com Group in 2019, and completed a HKEX secondary listing in April 2021. The no-layoff SARS playbook became the standard example cited across China's 2020 COVID coverage.